Minneapolis-St. Paul is the recovery king among Midwest metros

Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit and most other Midwest metros are all just looking up at the economic performance of Minneapolis-St. Paul.The Star-Tribune in Minneapolis crunches some U.S. Department of Commerce data to report that “of major (Midwestern) cities from Cleveland to Kansas City, only Milwaukee and the Twin Cities clawed back the economic activity they lost” in the recession from 2008 to 2011.Minneapolis-St. Paul's economic output grew 1.5% in that timeframe, Milwaukee's output grew 0.4%. No other Midwest metro recorded growth in that period, according to The Star-Tribune.The secret sauce for the Twin Cities?“We've got a somewhat higher concentration of higher-skilled employment, and that's also been a source of some of our strength and would translate into more rapid GDP growth,” says Steve Hine, labor market economist at the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.

The president wants to increase the minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015, a move Democrats generally favor and Republicans oppose. But this Wall Street Journal op-ed notes that many Democrats in Congress, including Sen. Sherrod Brown, don't pay anything to the ultimate entry-level workers — interns.

“Internships at the White House, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in Washington introduce thousands of young people to working in government and to the discipline and industry needed to function in any workplace,” writes Dwight Lee, a professor at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Yet these unpaid positions are almost by definition reserved for the offspring of the well-to-do who are least in need of such an advantage.Prof. Lee describes the intern policy for Sen. Brown as follows: “Interns in my Washington, D.C. office work on a wide range of projects," prospective applicants are told. But the young folks are on their own when it comes to expenses: "internships in my Ohio and Washington, D.C. offices are unpaid. In addition, we are unable to reimburse you for parking and mileage."The value of such unpaid internships, Prof. Lee argues, makes the case against a minimum wage hike.“An entry-level job is much more important for many young people than making a little summer money,” he writes. “It is the best opportunity they have for getting the training to develop skills they need to earn a good income later in life when they will have more financial obligations. Increasing the minimum wage would make this path to a better financial future harder than it needs to be for the young people who already face the most difficulty.”

Progressive Corp. rates a mention in this Forbes.com story about new “generic” top-level domain names such as .art, .insurance and .sport making it “harder for companies to track cybersquatters who appropriate brand names, siphon traffic their way and run scams.”With applications for nearly 2,000 new domain names outstanding, each one of which will function as a miniature .com registry under the control of the winning bidder, “the new territories will be exponentially harder to monitor than the existing world of .com, .edu, .gov and a handful of generics like .travel and .museum,” Forbes.com reports.“It's going to be a very confusing, expensive and time-consuming process for trademark owners,” Joanne Ludovici, a partner with McDermott & Will in Washington, D.C., tells Forbes.com. “It's a bigger enforcement landscape.”

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, “closed the application window for the new generics on May 30 and is expected to release the first batch of domains this spring,” according to the story.Mayfield Village-based Progressive applied for .insurance as a way to “provide a platform for Progressive . . . to market to and acquire new customers,” Forbes.com notes.But the website adds that Microsoft, in a Jan. 31 letter to ICANN, complained that companies seeking “closed” generics like .app, .jewelry and .insurance threaten “the openness and freedom of the internet and could have harmful consequences for internet users worldwide.”

Bloomberg pans a New York City art show called “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star,” but some photography of Cleveland apparently is one of the show's few saving graces. The curators at the New Museum show “reason that 1993 marks the year when issues we are still dealing with today, from gay rights and gun control to multiculturalism and identity politics, took center stage,” Bloomberg says. “The provocative and politically charged art on view addresses the same subjects: the AIDS crisis, violence, feminism, sexual and racial identity.”However, the review notes that “only a few works rise above agitprop.”Among those are “straightforward documentary photographs of Cleveland” by photographer John Miller, according to Bloomberg.You also can follow me on Twitter for more news about business and Northeast Ohio.

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